At A.Blog, my friend Jan Clausen is blogging from “Occupy Wall Street” as an activist, lit scholar, poet, social critic, union member . . . I could go on, with the labels, but won’t. Clausen’s writing has spanned numerous genres. In the 1980s, she focused heavily on fiction, publishing a story collection and two novels with the Crossing Press (U.S.) and The Women’s Press Ltd. (U.K.). Her memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity was issued by Houghton Mifflin in 1999. Two poetry collections, From a Glass House (IKON) and If You Like Difficulty (Harbor Mountain Press) appeared in 2007.

In addition to its lit-focus, the diversity of subjects covered at A.Blog–as well as Jan’s intelligent and steely humor–makes A.Blog a go-to source for all things OWS, at least for this backwoods Vermonter.

In a recent post, BUT WHAT ARE MY SISTERS THINKING? Clausen begins by describing her reading of Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “The Outer Banks” under less than sunny skies, reading “into the wind and rain at Zuccotti Park today,” the poem “torn from my lips and swallowed up by the elements.”

Clausen says that she would like to know

what my sisters are thinking about Occupy Wall Street; and I’d especially like to know more about what many of them are experiencing inside Zuccotti Park, that famously “leaderless” collectivity. I’ve heard and commented on various currents of discussion about the racial dynamics of OWS, and to a lesser extent class dynamics, but nobody (that I know of) seems thus far to be interested in talking about what difference gender makes at the intersection of Broadway and Liberty.

In AMID THE BROADWAY TORRENT, THE LANGUAGE IS NOT YET WORN OUT, writing after the news of the brutal Oakland Police attack on the Iraq-veteran protester–which landed the protester in the hospital, in critical condition, with a fractured skull–Clausen moves into a discussion of health care, via poet and doctor William Carlos Williams.

In between she discusses meeting her friend at OWS, who is

handing out fliers headlined “‘Occupy Wall Street’–Strategy for Expansion.” He thinks the next step should be taking possession of unused or underused spaces on behalf of the 99%–a proposal that reminded me of a column by Black Agenda Report’s Bruce Dixon a couple of weeks back, suggesting that the Occupy movement will become more attractive to large numbers of African Americans if and when it begins to occupy what he calls “the goods in our hoods,” i.e. the large numbers of foreclosed and abandoned homes concentrated in low income communities (http://blackagendareport.com/content/occupying-financial-districts-occupying-goods-our-hoods).

And, in MY SIGN HAS TWO SIDES, Clausen writes

I also read several poems by Joy Harjo from an early book, She Had Some Horses  (Thunder’s Mouth Press,  1983). Somehow I’ve always loved and been touched by this book in a way that hasn’t been true for more recent work of Harjo’s. I especially love the litany of the title poem (“She had horses who were bodies of sand./She had horses who were maps drawn of blood./She had horses who were skins of ocean water./…She had some horses she loved./She had some horses she hated.//These were the same horses.”) An Occupation is a wonderful place in which to read a litany–to really let yourself go reading it. I finished with “I Give You Back,” which seemed to contain a special message for the moment: “I release you, my beautiful and terrible/fear. I release you…./I give you back to the white soldiers/who burned down my home, beheaded my children,/raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.” Of course the question of the role of fear in perpetuating suffering is universal, and at the same time, a poem like this raises the key question that OWS is confronting (or failing to confront) as it continues to elaborate the metaphor of “the 99%” in the teeth of all our differences. To quote from an article by Manissa McCleave Maharawal in the most recent (October 22) issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal (“So Real It Hurts: Building a New Republic”): “Let me tell you what it feels like as a woman of color to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard.”

In solidarity, before signing off on this brief post and heading upstate to hear Red Heart the Ticker–I’d like to offer two other pieces with horses. One is a prose poem, ostensibly; the other, fiction. Who knows which is which? I’ll certainly never tell:

Horse
By Julianna Spallholz
from The State of Kansas (GenPop Books, 2012)

There is a war happening in another country. There are horses that are native to the other country where the war is. The horses are not regular horses. They are very big and muscular and they have charcoal colored skin instead of hair. She can see the horses. They have enormous teeth that are long and pointed. The horses are endangered in the country where the war is. There is a soldier who is specially trained to kill the horses that are endangered in the country where the war is. She can see the soldier. The horses line up in pairs before the soldier. The pair of horses in the front of the line charges the soldier. She can see the horses’ charcoal skin and their muscles as they run toward the soldier, and the horses show their long enormous pointed teeth. The soldier crouches on the ground and waits for the horses. When the horses are close to the soldier, the soldier springs from the ground and brings a large watermelon down upon the horses’ heads. The horses are then stunned and wounded. The soldier then uses a long pointed blade to halve the horses’ heads. The horses fall dead. The soldier then returns to his position and crouches on the ground and waits for the next pair of horses. The next pair of horses charges the soldier and the soldier springs from the ground and brings a large watermelon down upon the horses’ heads. The horses are then stunned and wounded. The soldier then uses a long pointed blade to halve the horses’ heads. The horses fall dead. The soldier then returns to his position and crouches on the ground and waits for the next pair of horses. This will continue until the soldier who is specially trained to kill the horses has killed all the horses. The horses will continue to line up in pairs and to charge the soldier and to be killed.

*

In the Horrifying Land of Clay
by Aase Berg; translated by Johannes Goransson
from With Deer (Black Ocean, 2008)

There was an evil horse that galloped along the evil river in the horrifying land of clay. There was an evil horse that galloped with me on its back. Beneath the hair-strap his muscles moved and chafed against the muscles of my taut inner thighs which clamped down around his body.I was scared and breathless and dynamic for this tall evil horse was my enemy. We galloped across the field this empty day as it rained clay and lead and the snow lay half-melted here and there in the flaccid landscape. His hooves sank into dung and muck. There was an evil horse that galloped across horrifying fields this evil day in the evil life, and I was on top. He galloped me across the furrows of plowed tired soil, across barren plots whose farmers lay dead and worm-eaten in ditches. There was an evil horse that galloped, and on the outskirts of the horrifying land the bears waited for us and stood on their hind legs and spread their claws. Up in the sky, buzzards floated in death-silent formations, preparing. I froze in my skin–it pined and chafed against the sharp wind that hurled its sharp drops against my egg-face. There was an evil horse that galloped through the horrifying land, an evil and dark horse with manhood and musculature, and I was thrilled to have him as my enemy.